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Spring is here and regardless of how the weather is responding, home buyers are ready for it. The best way to get them to emotionally connect with what your home has to offer is to entice them with what they are already looking for.

Inviting furniture layouts that evoke entertaining and family activity to the front of their minds are part of the key of a successful sale. Bright, warm colors, help them defrost emotionally and connect with the home.

Light and bright is important, and not just in color selections

At this time of the year, buyers are ready for winter to be over and are ready to shed the warm, heavy drabness of the previous season. It is important that during showings windows are clean, curtains are pulled back, and lots of light is allowed to pour in. Potential home buyers love light, especially after a long, cold winter.

Bright pops of color in accessories and textiles help buyers shake the winter blues.

When your home has color on the walls that appeal to the bright springtime feeling, but could be too taste specific for home buyers, the key to a good staging is to make sure that we neutralize and make the color work to create an elegant, comfortable space that buyers will connect with.

If you are ready to sell your home for the most money possible in the current market, contact Home Matters today. We’ll create a plan to maximize the appeal to today’s home buyers.

When a home stager visits a vacant home, our first job is to determine how the buyer will want to live in it. What are the features and benefits of the home and how do we direct their attention to them. We also need to decide whether a room can currently function for the necessary lifestyle and how do we need to address likely objections. In open floor plans that have become popular, we may need to help define layouts and flow. In other rooms, we may need to help buyers determine simple questions like, “Where does my TV go?”

Home staging answers buyer objections before they happen.

While from a design standpoint, TVs are ugly and can be visually distracting, the fact is that today’s buyers want one. They will want to know how to gather in a room around one while still enjoying the primary focal points of the room.

By providing the answers to buyers most common objections prior to them seeing the home, it becomes easier for them to see their lives in the home, encouraging the emotional connection that will likely lead to a sale.

We are frequently asked about what this service is and exactly what you can expect to get from it, and how it helps you prepare your property for sale.

First let me say, that it is important to understand our definition of a home staging consultation.  There are as many definitions as there are home staging companies.

A Home Matters consultation is a customized assessment of your home that takes into consideration the typical buyer demographic profile to make recommendations and solutions for preparing your property for the staging phase of the selling process.  It is not a generic checklist but rather involves the knowledge of home improvements, design trends and principles as well as tried and true staging strategies and best practices.  Our consultations include the following:

• A 2 hour overall assessment of your home, including curb appeal.
• Room by room recommendations for preparing your home for staging.
• Color analysis.
• Fixture and Finish recommendations.
• Repair, replacement and updating recommendations.
• Room layout and furniture editing recommendations.
• Pre-sell packing recommendations.
• Storage solutions.
• Detail cleaning and refreshing recommendations to include odor remedies, if necessary.
• Pet best practices during the sale of your home.
• Showing instructions while living in your home.
• Recommendations of tradesmen that might be of service to you in helping you with the preparing part of the staging process.

Another frequently asked question is; “Why would you need to return to stage my home, if I’ve already done the preparation part?”

If you do all of the recommendations, you certainly have improved your homes marketable position among the competition, but is it enough?

When you place your home on the market you have in essence entered a competition.  Among those competitors there will be homes that sell quickly and for top dollar, there will be homes that sell at some point and for a discounted price and there will be homes that don’t sell at all.  What determines your competitive positioning or ranking, is in the strength or weakness of your competitors.

When the team at Home Matters returns to stage your prepared home, we are looking past the preparation recommendations and are now focusing on a much higher level of property presentation.  We are then considering such things as;

• Determining the creative schematic of your home, including Buyer demographics, Psychographics and Geographic’s.
• Design principals and trends.
• Identifying and addressing awkward spaces.
• Augmenting with just the right lifestyle furnishings, if needed.
• Maximizing square footage and room flow.
• Distributing visual weight.
• Balancing sight lines.
• Maximizing views.
• Distribution of Lighting.
• Utilizing the appropriate scale, colors and textures that pull the rooms together.
• Adding more perceived value to your homes presentation.

Before Staging                                     After Staging

Once a home owner decides to sell their home regardless of the reason, the speed of the sale and the equity they retain becomes their goal.   That is, in fact the goal of Home Matters too.  We believe it is important to give our clients every opportunity to execute the preparation part of the staging plan. We look forward to helping them set the scene so they can seal the deal.

Plan Today for a Successful Sale Tomorrow because your Home Matters!

Spring has sprung and the real estate market is picking up right on cue. For some, the faster pace of the market creates the belief that home staging is no longer a necessity. This kind of thinking could land you on the wrong side of the listing table, however.

Home staging can help Realtors close more listing deals.

One of the benefits of working closely with a professional home stager is a tremendous marketing advantage. While home staging has become more popular over the past several years, as a percentage of the industry, few Realtors actually provide these services. This increases the likelihood that you will be able to offer a significant unique selling proposition (USP).

Imagine the role of the home seller before they list their home.

Many sellers today will interview multiple Realtors prior to choosing the one that will sell their home. Often these connections are made by referrals from their friends or family. Sometimes they are because they saw the sign in a yard of a successful sale. Often times it has to do with other marketing efforts, either online, through farming, or other advertisement.

Each Realtor that is interviewed will have a majority of similar marketing strategies. They will put their home on hundreds of sites online through IDX distribution. They will provide flyers and market to other agents. They will have broker tours and open houses. Perhaps they even provide professional photography or virtual tours. How many provide the service of a certified professional that will tell them what they need to change in order to change the marketable value of their home? 

If this is your competition, you may lose out at the listing table. Instead, what if YOU were that competition?

As inventory levels continue to be minimal, the competition for each listing will increase. What you offer, along with what you already do, is what will help increase your business.

Ready to add a home staging professional to your listing arsenal? Call Home Matters.